Surfacing content in the era of AI: the more things change, the more they don't

Chucking stuff at search and hoping it sticks has always been a blindfolded lottery. With AI Overviews we have even less idea of how it chooses what to show.

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:07, 15 May 2025

Great news everyone. The Google guessing game is now AI-enhanced, as publishers are forced to strategise around how to get featured as a source in AI Overviews. This latest level-up to the game features even more commercially perilous fun, as we face a new version of the Ranking Game End Boss, who is both even less predictable and a good deal dumber than the previous one, and lives on a diet of carefully butchered click-through rates.

Reading The First-Ever UX Study Of Google’s AI Overviews is fascinating stuff. There's a great deal of detail in it about actual user behaviour, the thought processes behind different search styles, the difference in behaviour between mobile and desktop and different age groups, and so on. Highly recommended. 

One question has struck a chord with me, as despite all the expectations of GenAI search mayhem looking like a Friday night Glasgow bar fight, some things stay exactly the same: "How does Google choose which sources surface in the [most prominent] AIO, and in what order?"

This position in AIO is the new version of page one of Google search. The new Above the Fold. The new old.

Whatever trials and tribulations publishers face in all this one-sided upheaval, some things will remain the same, and that is the SEO guessing game. Or whatever we're calling SEO in the LLM age. Put simply, one of the key questions is exactly how does Google choose sources to surface in its AIO feature?

Back to the future
To those of us familiar with the internet over the past few decades, one of the great mysteries, perhaps the greatest, has been how and why Google search chose to surface one thing over another.

From the publisher side of what has become a content chasm, it often felt like we were throwing things over to Google's side without even a "clunk!" to discern it had landed, never mind a howl as it actually hit an audience.

Any insight into what was happening on Google's side was regarded as valuable beyond belief, and there wasn't much of it. We've written before about the enigmatic nature of Google's own documentation around what is required to make a site competitive for search, and its malign ambiguity is still a lesson in saying a lot while actually meaning little. 

Finding the gap between what Google said, and what actually happened, was easily big enough to create a whole industry in its own right. Many SEO empires are built around Google's elusiveness, which let's not forget comes as a result of both wanting to retain its commercial advantage and also uncertainty in how some of their algorithm updates would actually play out IRL.

Intrepid content experimenters and determined SEO types are both heroes and villains in this. Keyword spamming and listicles still haunt the reputation of some SEO and publishers alike. The horror. Yet given a situation in which the prime means of transmission for your content is in the hands of a business who regard your work as irrelevant compared to their own general mission - selling adverts and not being evil - then of course people trying to make their own money will find ways to game the system.

It is with this in mind that expert SEO insurgent Lily Ray this week revealed yet another investigative gem and explained just how easy it is to game AIO, which seems to be confirmation that however much things change, the more they stay the same. 

Her findings are pretty extraordinary. Recall some of the dark arts of SEO that could maybe give your page a ranking boost? No need with AIO. Simply put a page on your own website saying that your business is the best, and AIO will repeat that claim for you as fact. That's not a flaw. That's trash. 

We all know the volatile value of "best" as a search term, but now a monkey-see-monkey-do LLM will spit it out without curation.

Once many more of us get our teeth into attempting to direct AIO results our way, I would anticipate shenanigans of a manipulative nature even the worst part of the SEO world hasn't yet burped up. 

The winds of AI are blowing hard across our industry, but once they die down, we'll see some wind blowing the other way, and it will get into AIO's crevices.